Empiric Therapy for Febrile Neutropenia

Dr. Inciardi believes that our report [1] left several issues unanswered. We take this as a compliment, given that the opposite often seems true when few data are tortured until they yield their secrets. The extensive data assembled for this study were far greater than we could hope to include in a single report. In choosing our priorities, we omitted logistic regression analysis because variables such as age, underlying disease, and depth and duration of granulocytopenia were well balanced, as can be seen in Table 1 of our original report, suggesting that any possible effect would be slight. We concur with Dr. Inciardi, however, that such an analysis might provide a more useful assessment for patient-related factors. One member of our group has already completed an analysis on prognostic factors in the development of superinfection [2], and we plan to extend this analysis to outcome in general.